So I think these posts are going to become shorter and/or non-existent in the future because I think we're really starting to find our rhythm. That's not to say that the raid leaders' aren't spending way too much time behind the scenes discussing things with each other and refining strategies and individual roles so on, but I think our groupwide performance is greatly improving. All the stuff which makes the group work well together, showing up prepared and on time, listening to and carrying out specific jobs, being involved in post fight analysis, responding to new ideas etc. is happening better and better which is good to see.

Friday night (wound/disease) went pretty well although we still need to work on the disease trash a bit more. The wound wing was just a case of getting the new pople used to the channels (it happens, don't worry!) and refining the positioning in the main room. We need to work a bit more on setting and communicating priority target assigning, but don't worry we'll be better prepared next time and as people practice where their targets pop up they'll get better at picking them up quickly at the right time.

Sunday night went exceptionally well I thought. We went in there with the basic outline of a strat and just had to work at how best to implement it, with a few little refinements along the way. Again, it's a fight we need to practice but we learned a lot last night and we'll get better at it every time we go in there now. We'll make some minor changes to the main strat post but basically it's just a case of getting back in there and doing it again.

A few individual shoutouts - thanks to redoak for coming along, pretty daunting like that coming into raids for the first time and he did a good job overall and i'm sure he learned a lot. Great work to the 2x rk healers in the durin's bane fight, that's a fight where there's constant AOE effects, some nasty spike damage and a punishing execute threshold which all adds up to a heck of a lot of healing pressure. You guys did yourselves proud. The tanks did a great job with the tank swapping, again that's a high pressure job (it's one of the toughest tank mechanics that Turbine put into raids) and the added complication of rotating the positioning to stop us getting yanked over the edge made it even more difficult. Overall that side of things went really well. And EVERYONE did a super-awesome job of spinning around for the callouts. I was watching those morale bars and I might have missed something but I think everyone basically turned around at every callout. When we got that one @8k morale I was soooo sure people were going to be so intent on DPSing that last little bit down that they'd stay facing him, die and we'd all get executed but my pessimism was unfounded - excellent work!

Yup, all in all that went great and by far the Balrog has been the coolest, in a manner of speaking.

A few things of note, mostly related to the Balrog. It seems that given our experience with the other wings, we are handling the 'trash' much better. While they may all have their differences, it's still a case of mez what you can, tank some and have the group burn each one in order, while adjusting to any break outs etc.

The fact we didn't wipe on any of the fear trash, in fact did we even have any deaths on that, I don't think so, just goes to show how far we have come.

As for the Balrog, it seems that Do not Fall to Fire is a real game changer, short of the tank being in real trouble, I think that matters more then healing. I noticed a few times on the big AOE, that we didn't take any damage, which no doubt then made healing easier.

Having the tank that doesn't currently have aggro return to the group, seemed to work well. One minor thing I think I did notice, was the Balrog turning to face the group as the tanks swapped aggro. I'm not sure how big a deal it is, but in theory, if possible to avoid, that maybe good.

On the subject of staying behind the Balrog and avoiding the frontal AOE, I have a feeling it's a bit finer line then 180. Either that or I needed to find a bit better of a position. I noticed a couple of times getting hit and I think because he stands one foot in front of the other, that being clearly behind isn't as clear cut as it seems. I'm looking forward to trying it again and seeing if I can pick a better spot. At the same time, while it wasn't bad, I also think the group needs to ball up a bit more and especially move a bit quicker. It sounds like a T2 run at the Balrog, involves a lot more moving around.

Even so, it's been a blast and you can see that if we had tried much of this a month or so ago, it would have been endless wipes. And on top of Babbles shoutouts, I think we should also give a big thanks to the leadership group for all the hard work they have been doing to get our little raid group going and being able to mix it with some of the hardest content LOTRO has to offer.

I certainly agree re do not fall. There was a big noticable difference between our first and second attempt when the healers made a conscious attempt to use it more. I don't know if you were there when I was pasting my combat log parse, but I had "absorb absorb absorb absorb" in the parse for the AOE a lot of the time and when that hit it was doing 700ish damage so that's a huge difference.

The positioning isn't quite as strict as you worry I don't think. With the distributed attack, I'm pretty sure that as long as people are getting hit by it (and you can see from the animation that it's got a reasonably wide range) then I believe it distributes the full amount. Also I'm reasonably sure it's only a 180 deg frontal, as you can see in the vid below (T2 - SCARY!) the resistance kinship spends a lot of their time in the fight only just behind frontal AOE (not sure why) and you can bet that they wouldn't be doing that if it was going to get them hit by the frontal. I agree we should try to bunch up as much as possible, but a few metres here, and not being positioned 100% opposite the tank isn't going to break things.

Oh, it's possible though that you were having a hitbox problem. I'm not sure how wide exactly his hitbox is compared to his picture, but if you're standing in the front half of the hitbox you'll get hit by the frontal AOE. So it might be worth taking a couple of steps back so while you're still clearly in melee range there's no chance of you stepping 'in front' of him.

I was making sure I wasn't getting too close, especially on our last run at it. One still needs to be fairly close tho, range on most skills is 2.5m. I noticed a couple of 700ish hits, but maybe that was for full 360 aoe and not the 180 frontal.

All in all, I basically really just need to do it again and pay some more attention to various things.

yeah, 700 damage sounds like the 360 AOE. I'll go through my log tonight and paste the names and appx damages if you like, but iirc the 360 one was going about 700 on a normal and 1000 on a crit hit (and being absorbed a lot of the time by do not fall).

Nice. I'll be interested in getting some more info on the size and type of damage that the tank takes. if my few hits from the flaming blade are anything to go by, it seems that the tank is taking significnatly more fire than shadow damage which gives some direction in equipment choices for the two tanks.

Right now, I'd say that the rest of the raid mainly needs to concentrate on shadow defence - fidelity, honor and the purple lothlorien 3-piece set (it's 50 DG marks total, i just picked mine up last night). I say that not only for the fear fight but also for Ivar. Ivar does massive AOE shadow damage which hits everyone in the raid regardless of positioning and this tiers up over the fight and then couples with his final phase when everyone in the raid gets a -50% incoming healing debuff. Big shadow mitigation's gonna be key to surviving that....